February Meeting: Going from an Outsource Studio to Selling CATs

Join us on Wednesday, February 21st at 7pm in Intrepid Labs, in The American Twine Building (222 Third St. Cambridge, MA 02141 4th floor) for our next Boston Post Mortem meeting:

Going from an Outsource Studio to Selling CATs

Ever thought about running a contract game studio? Tricky Fast Studios has been in that business for 6 years, and Mike Handverger is here to talk about what he’s learned in that time. You’ll learn about how to find and keep clients, employees, and subcontractors. Mike will also give some tips on managing spending and cashflow. Finally, he’ll talk about what Tricky Fast did during their latest slow period– make CAT Game Builder. CAT is a new visual scripting tool for Unity that Tricky Fast had been using internally. It is now available on the Unity Asset Store and was named one of the top assets of January 2018. Mike will talk about what went into building it, what its predecessors were, and plans for the future.

About the Speaker:

With 20 years of experience as a software engineer and manager, Mike Handverger has had his hands on many large-scale projects both in and out of the gaming world. As president of Tricky Fast Studios, he’s worked on AAA Mobile Games in big IPs like Star Trek, The Walking Dead, Transformers, and Wheel of Fortune. Prior to Tricky Fast, he was a lead engineer on 38 Studios’ unreleased AAA MMORPG, Kingdoms of Amalur. Outside of gaming, Mike was an early employee at Etsy.com, and during his time there, he led the team to scale the site up to 1 billion monthly page-views.

There are two entrances to the American Twine Building- one is closer to second street around the side of the building, this is the entrance you want! Take elevators up to the 4th floor and that entire floor is Intrepid. After 6pm security will ask you to sign in but no ID is required.